State auditor to probe Prop. 71 institutes

This seems like good news for preborn babies and the pro-life movement, as reported by the San Francisco Chronicle and political expert Steve Frank: The California legislature's Joint Legislative Audit Committee today ordered the state auditor to probe the groups set up by Proposition 71, the 2004 ballot initiative that authorizes $3 billion to fund human embryonic stem cell experimentation.

As established under Proposition 71, the groups -- the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine and the Independent Citizens' Oversight Committee -- are a law unto themselves. They are not subject to state oversight, and they want to parcel out some or much of the $3 billion to themselves/their own research groups.

More good news is that for almost 18 months, the ghoulish human embryonic stem cell experimentation has been on hold, thanks to lawsuits by the Life Legal Defense Foundation and another group. The anti-lifers are furious about that.

This would be a good time for Cardinal Mahony and the rest of California's bishops to speak up in defense of embryonic babies, and emphatically.

The bishops could tell their flock, and the rest of the public, that on February 27 the Vicar of Christ, Pope Benedict XVI, told the Pontifical Academy for Life, "...the Magisterium of the Church has constantly proclaimed the sacred and inviolable nature of each human life, from conception to natural end. This moral judgment also holds at the beginning of an embryo's life, even before it is implanted in the mother's womb."